Fast-Growing Indie Publishers
adding that Sweet Child Born in New York will come out this
year. Brown Books also continued to focus on the K–12 class-
room library market—and books that discuss special needs and
inclusion in particular, led by Jo Mach’s Finding My Way series.
Brown Books has capitalized on the boom in audiobook sales
following its entrance into the market in 2018. According to Reale,
the company expanded its in-house production and its relationship
with Recorded Books, whose Tantor division produced the first two
audiobooks in Devri Walls’s Venators series last year.
North Atlantic Books is another publisher that
benefitted from growth in the audiobook market. According
to Tim McKee, publisher of the nonprofit, North Atlantic’s
investment in its audiobook infrastructure contributed to a
doubling of sales of the format in 2019 over 2018.
Last year was another year during which North Atlantic
benefited from growing interest in
its core areas of trauma, plant medi-
cine, grief, racial justice, the lim-
inal, self-healing, and indigenous
cosmologies. The increased interest,
McKee notes, led to strong backlist
sales. Top backlist sellers in 2019 included the ever-popular Walter
the Farting Dog which sold more than 38,000 units across all for-
mats, followed by Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve,
Waking the Tiger, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and The Wild Edge
of Sorrow. Backlist accounts for about 75% of North Atlantic
annual sales. The publisher’s two bestselling new releases in 2019
were Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses and Evolutionary Herbalism.
Another long-term aspect of North Atlantic’s publishing
program—putting a priority on the diversity of its authors,
particularly with regard to race, age, sexual orientation, and
gender—also contributed to a better financial performance,
McKee says, as did the increased impact of diverse voices within
North Atlantic’s organization.
Working with its distributor, Penguin Random House,
North Atlantic had a strong performance in special markets last
year, McKee notes. PRH also helped North Atlantic reduce the
number of returns to the point where the return rate is now
about half of what it was several years ago, he adds.
Charlesbridge Publishing executive v-p and pub-
lisher Mary Ann Sabia says the company’s sales gain last year was
spread across a number of channels, including “very strong
growth” in the school and library market. Other solid increases
came in sales of subscription boxes and e-books, while
Charlesbridge also had a “nice bump” in sales in the U.K.
The breadth of Charlesbridge’s sales is reflected in its bestselling
frontlist titles from
last year. SumoKitty
was a Kids Indie
Next List pick, and Woodstock: 50 Years of Peace and Music was
released by its Imagine adult imprint. Other bestsellers were a new
paperback edition of Whoosh! and Lola Goes to School, the latest
release in its Lola Readers series, written by Anna McQuinn and